


my hands are cold (but my heart is gold)

by gayapplewhite



Series: i'm here in search of your glory (there's been a million before me) [1]
Category: Girl Meets World
Genre: Alternate Universe - Buffy The Vampire Slayer Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 18:48:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14002323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayapplewhite/pseuds/gayapplewhite
Summary: “there is one girl, in every generation, destined to fight evil and forces of darkness.riley is that girl.she takes it surprisingly well.”or; riley matthews's first year as the slayer.





	my hands are cold (but my heart is gold)

**Author's Note:**

> heyo i'm here with your friendly neighborhood slayer au!! it's like buffy, but with girl meets world characters and set in roughly 2016-17 all that jazz. rough equivalents for everyone in this chapter are riley as buffy, obvs, shawn as giles, farkle as willow, charlie as xander, smackle as oz (i don't plan on doing seven fics in this series l m a o so i sped up some arcs), zay as angel, and missy as drusilla, (ft. minor appearances by lucas as spike and vanessa as darla). like i said those are rough equivalents, so not everything that dru did missy will do, and not everything willow did farkle will do, so on and so forth. also yes, it'll be gay next time i swear
> 
> the title comes from “gasoline” by halsey; the series title comes from “the last of the real ones” by fall out boy. please kudos and comment is you enjoyed, it means a lot to me!

it starts with a girl. 

**no, no, go back...**

it starts a thousand years ago, with a girl who long ago forgot her true name, who dies but does not die, and instead _rises_ from the dead and is worshipped. she feasts upon human sacrifices, but in the end, her civilization dies (as all civilizations do).

she does not. 

she crawls the earth, feeding upon humans and tossing them aside, never once caring until she meets _him_.

she finds him in spain, dying on the battlefield, and for the first time, she shares her gift, and she turns him into what she is. and the two of them rule the night together, taking what they want and never looking back. 

she names herself after a butterfly somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, and he isn’t quite sure when it happens, but the name suits her. (he keeps his name, likes the roll of the syllables off her tongue, _ay-zai-uh_ ).

not long after, he takes a society girl, and leaves blood dripping down her velvet gown, as she takes what is rightfully hers ( _after all, they once gave her sacrifices_ ) from the girl’s parents. he turns her; he cannot resist her pout or the way that she screams. they put the name mathilde on her grave, and he laughs, a deep, throaty laugh, because she has never been their mathilde. she has always been missy.

she is their equal in some ways, but their lesser in others. she is impulsive, and she loves pretty things ( ~~in particular, pretty men~~ ), and, well.

he is a farm boy, prettier than any other. she croons to him, calling out sweet whispers until he takes her back to his bed. she dyes his white sheets red with his blood, and she turns him into one of them. 

( ~~this is not the last you’ll see of them.~~ )

**there. that’s better, isn’t it?**

**and now, back to the beginning.**

it starts with a girl. riley matthews is born as a squalling baby on december eighth, 2001, ~~second~~ first child to two happy parents, with an almost-uncle who ( _somehow?_ even he isn’t sure exactly how it happened) ended up on the payroll of a magical organization, after some questionably bad choices in his early twenties during a semester abroad.

she first comes into her destiny when she’s fourteen. he’s seen it on her before, like a child playing dress up with her mother’s oversized coat. he’s seen to it that she’s grown up a gymnast, with martial arts classes and soccer, and though she’s tall and lanky, she’s strong, and when she comes to his apartment (right above her parents, though he’s almost never there, preferring to be around her parents in their apartment instead) crying about a man with the face of a monster in the hallway, he locks her outside the apartment with a stake. ( _it’s for her own good, anyway_ , he thinks to himself, but can’t quite make himself believe it). she kills the vampire, and he sits her down with a cup of tea and tells her it all. 

there is one girl, in every generation, destined to fight evil and forces of darkness. 

riley is that girl. 

she takes it surprisingly well.

**and this is where it all begins.**

right before her sophomore year of high school, someone attacks her family, and she makes the difficult choice to move upstate with her almost-uncle. it’s safer for her family, for her baby brother who she loves more than anything in the world, if she moves away. 

she starts her sophomore year at an entirely new school, filled with new people. he gets a job as the librarian. she meets him at the end of the day, bubbling with excitement about the new people she’s met, including a boy named charlie, a girl named haley, and another boy named farkle (farkle, really? he thinks to himself, but doesn’t tell her), and there’s a popular girl named chai who seems set out to make riley’s life miserable, but riley doesn’t seem quite down about it.

riley kills the girl named haley that evening. well. that’s not exactly right. she lets her die, and almost kills a vampire named missy who’d been feeding on haley. missy escapes, because missy is hundreds of years old, and what shawn thinks but does not say is _you’re lucky she didn’t kill you_ , because missy was turned hundreds of years ago and has a penchant for torturing her victims to insanity. she’s killed at least three slayers. shawn knows these things. sometimes he wishes he didn’t.

riley watches haley bleed out on the tomb floor, and goes home and spends the night beating her punching bag until shawn makes her go to bed sometime in the early morning hours. he bandages her knuckles (bloody and raw, at this point), and kisses her forehead once she’s in bed, and thinks to himself that he can’t let her punish herself like this over every little failure. (if he did, he thinks to himself, what kind of watcher would he be?)

it’s not long before farkle and charlie are spending every afternoon with riley in the library. farkle’s book-smart, and he and charlie have been casual acquaintances since middle school, but never really friends, not til riley, and charlie’s a jokester, which even shawn, even world-weary, work-burdened shawn admits they need to keep the library from being _all_ doom and gloom. (there’s still quite a lot of it. after all, vampire slaying isn’t exactly a light and breezy task). 

riley goes out every night for patrol while shawn makes dinner, and they eat around midnight or one am, and one night riley comes back talking about a boy called zay. he’s charming, and southern, and riley’s infatuated with him. shawn smiles and shrugs it off, assuming that zay’s just a night owl. riley’s always had good instincts. 

the next night, after patrol, riley finds zay at her window, and lets him in. riley feels ashamed, suddenly, that she’s in an old ratty tee shirt and her hair is wet from the shower, and then, he leans in and she kisses him and he pulls away, and riley opens her eyes and sees his face. he has the face of a monster, and riley screams. 

zay jumps out of the window. 

shawn spends the next day researching, and comes across what riley says is zay’s picture in one of his books. riley immediately asks him what it says, but he doesn’t tell her. he can’t. isaiah is a vampire almost a thousand years old. missy is one of the vampires he sired. he's killed five slayers in his time, and is often seen in the company of missy, a vampire called luke, known for his violent outbursts and preference for petite brunettes (shawn learns that missy sired him, and thinks _mommy complex much?_ ), as well as a vampire called vanessa, who took up the name in the nineteenth century but is much, much older than that; she is perhaps older than all recorded human history. between the four of them, they have a slayer kill count that is double digits, and shawn sighs. he knew this wouldn't be easy, sending his almost-niece to fight the darkness and evil of the world, but he'd never imagined how hard it could be, and he wonders, what is he doing here? what could isaiah possibly want?

**let's go back a few centuries, shall we?**

isaiah was younger, but not quite young (remember, he's quite old, even for a vampire) when he and vanessa and missy and luke traveled to america for the first time.

in boston, isaiah met a young girl, the daughter of a freed slave, named nell. he charmed her, kissed her on the hand and swept her across the dance floor before taking her into a back alley and feasting. 

nell's mother was grief-stricken, and cast a curse upon isaiah that brought his soul back to his body ( ~~what? you didn't know vampires were soulless? that's not our fault~~ ) and he finally felt remorse for the first time since that battlefield in spain. he separated himself from the others and survived on rats and other lowly creatures, so as to never harm another human again. he began calling himself zay, as he could no longer reconcile with the monster that called himself isaiah.

~~do not forget nell. this is not the last time you will hear of her.~~

**there. that's much better, isn't it?**

the next night, shawn is working late at the library, and then isaiah shows up. shawn jumps, he'll admit it, and then reaches for a stake. 

“listen,” isaiah pleads, and shawn does. 

isaiah tells shawn of the curse, and the soul, and shawn almost laughs because it sounds too ridiculous to be true, but why would a vampire make up such a story? what would be the point? 

shawn shakes ~~isaiah~~ zay’s hand and says, “welcome to the team.”

riley goes to school the next morning to find a dead rat in her locker, and chai, who is passing by, laughs at riley when riley screams. riley blinks back her tears and looks at the note. in fancy script, it reads, _there’s more where that came from. -missy_. riley throws the rat away and tries not to think about it. 

the next night is the full moon, and riley’s on patrol when a wolf with too-long limbs and too-sharp teeth attacks her. it scratches her arm, and it leans down to rip out her throat. she isn’t bitten, but only because she rips her silver necklace off her neck and shoves it at the creature. it yelps, and runs back into the woods that border the cemetery, and riley stakes another vampire before realizing what she’d just fought was a werewolf. she bandages her wounds that night, and hopes that lycanthropy doesn’t transfer by scratches.

after school in the library, riley says, “i fought a werewolf last night.”

shawn grimaces. “were you bitten?” he asks, and riley shakes her head. shawn breathes a sigh of relief. 

“do you know who it was?” charlie asks, and riley shakes her head. 

“werewolves transform for three nights,” shawn warns that night, before riley goes out on patrol. 

“i’ll be careful,” riley says, kissing him on the cheek. “i promise.”

she is careful. she catches the werewolf just as the moon is about to rise, and she’s surprised to find that she recognizes the face twisting into that of a monster right before her eyes. “smackle?” she asks, in surprise. she wouldn’t have thought the smartest girl in their class was a werewolf. _well,_ she muses, _werewolves are never who you think they are_. and then smackle is a monster and riley runs. 

smackle comes into the library the next night. “i’m sorry for attacking you,” she says. 

“you’re the werewolf?” farkle says, surprised. riley knows it’s because he and smackle have been academic rivals for years, and this year, they’ve become closer in a way that makes riley think they might be more than friends (she doesn’t know, but she’s got a sneaking suspicion). 

smackle bites her lip, nods. “yes,” she says. “i was bitten when i was nine. i just thought it was a wolf attack, but after my first period, i turned.”

“huh,” charlie says, in the tone of someone that hasn’t quite processed what’s happening yet. he glances at smackle, and then at farkle, and then oh-so-innocently raises his hand. 

“yes, charlie?” shawn asks with a sigh, because he knows that any time that charlie bothers to raise his hand is a time when something is going to come out of his mouth that no one really wants to hear. 

looking directly at farkle, charlie asks, “do hickeys turn you into a werewolf?”

shawn sighs again, and smackle turns red. “i don’t know,” he says, and farkle looks as though he’d rather be anywhere else. 

smackle joins their group, after this, and a month later, she shows up with bruises on her neck that riley _knows_ aren’t from her transformation, and she holds hands with farkle when they both think no one’s looking. 

smackle and zay are at each other’s throats, and riley’s worried about them (she knows the whole vampire-werewolf feud is exaggerated, but zay and smackle have her almost convinced it’s real), until one day, it settles into a teasing routine and somewhere in the months before prom charlie finds them making out in the stacks. charlie tells riley, and riley sits farkle down at their favorite pizza joint on a tuesday and tells him smackle’s cheating on his with zay. 

he shrugs. “she’s not cheating,” he says, and doesn’t really explain further. everyone is confused, but farkle doesn’t explain, not beyond the fact that smackle isn’t cheating on him, and zay refuses to answer questions, brushing them off with a, “i’m a thousand years old, i don’t have time to answer questions about my love life,” even when charlie points out he spent like, an hour deciding what to wear that he totally could have used answering one simple question about his love life.

someone finally manages to work up the nerve to ask smackle a week later, and she simply shrugs and says, “farkle’s my boyfriend. and zay’s my boyfriend. it’s not that hard.”

shawn is just glad that he’s not in high school anymore. 

riley and the rest of the gang are sophomores, meaning they aren't allowed to go to prom, but they can go to the after parties, and so riley buys a white dress after she spends weeks asking, and after shawn takes a million pictures, she leaves. she's walking to the high school where farkle and zay and charlie and isadora will meet her and charlie will drive them. they'd decided weeks ago that just because they weren't allowed to go to prom didn't mean they couldn't have fun. 

chai’s mother calls shawn an hour later, frantic. “have you seen my daughter?” she asks, tone pleading, and shawn admits he hasn't. she tells him that chai was getting ready for prom (she was invited by a junior) and vanished, leaving the window open and a note on her dresser in fancy curlicue handwriting.

shawn texts riley. _missy took chai_

riley doesn't respond. 

when riley gets to the high school, she gets a text. _my tires got slashed_ charlie says. _i'll be late._

riley sends him three smiley faces and sits on the bench outside the high school, but then she hears screaming, and she ventures inside, careful. she improvises and makes a stake out of a chair leg that she breaks. she feels kind of bad destroying school property, but it is for the greater good. 

she finds the source of the screaming at the pool. it's indoors, but it's old and grimy, and looks as though it hasn't been used in years, but despite that, there's water in it. 

at the side of the pool stands missy, with chai’s head twisted at an awkward angle in her hands. one of her sharp nails digs into chai’s neck, leaving a small trail of blood.

riley's phone buzzes. it's shawn. _missy took chai_ , it says, and riley puts it away. she knows. she'll respond to it later. 

“missy, let her go,” riley says, trying to sound strong. her voice shakes nonetheless. chai's face is pale with fear, and her red gown is the same shade of red as the thin trail of blood on her neck. 

missy laughs, and her fangs flash in the fluorescent light. “oh, but why would i do that?” she laughs. “not when it's so much fun to torture her.”

chai whimpers, and riley's heart breaks a little. she knows that girl, that frightened girl. she was that girl, once. 

she steels herself. she hasn't been that girl for a long, long time. “let her go, missy,” she says again. 

missy ignores her. “chai, darling,” she purrs, stroking chai’s hair with her free hand. “you remind me so much of who i used to be. so beautiful, so loved. don't you want to be beautiful forever?”

chai squirms in missy's grip, and riley takes a step forward. “let her go, missy, and you can have me,” riley says. 

missy looks up from chai, eyes flashing. her face is contorted, and her fangs are out. she looks almost ravenous. 

“now there’s an offer,” she hisses. “do you mean it?”

riley nods, dropping the stake and taking another step forward. the stake clatters to the ground, and missy lets chai go suddenly. chai collapses to the ground, and scrambles away from missy. 

missy reaches out and grabs riley’s shoulders, forcing her head sideways and. 

and then she _feasts_. 

**do you know what it's like to be a vampire’s prey?**

to be a vampire's prey means you feel no pain. you feel nothing. 

it is almost as though you're floating in a dreamless sleep. their saliva in your veins and on your skin feels almost like a drug. 

you can become an addict, if they let you live. 

**and now, wouldn't you like to find out what happens to poor riley?**

chai, pressed against the wall, sees all of this. she sees missy drink riley’s blood, and then toss her body aside as though it means nothing. riley’s body falls into the pool with a splash. chai can feel her heartbeat pounding, and her breath comes in quick, shallow gasps.

“i’ve missed the taste of slayer blood,” she moans, voice deep and low and contented, like a cat that had eaten the canary before she remembers chai.

“you're lucky,” she purrs, pointing at chai, “that i'm too full right now for you.” she smiles, a charming, twisted grin that chai is sure has charmed the men (and women) over the years.

and then missy leaves, humming some kind of haunting song to herself, and chai runs to the pool. she has to find out if riley's breathing.

riley is in a dead man's float on top of the water. chai thanks everything in her that she was a lifeguard over the summer. granted, she only did it because she looked good in the suit and needed the cash, but she’s got a good memory.

she pulls riley out of the pool; checks for her heartbeat. she’s not breathing. chai starts chest compressions and cpr, and after a long minute, riley coughs, her eyes fluttering open. 

“chai?” she asks, wide brown eyes confused. 

chai rocks back on her heels. “what was she?” she asks, voice hollow. she knows, she thinks she’s always known but she still can’t erase missy’s touch against her neck, but she needs to hear riley say it. 

“missy’s a vampire,” riley says. “i have to...i have to kill her. she’ll ravage this whole town if she can.” she tries to sit up, but falls back on her elbow. 

“careful,” chai says, and then they sit there in silence for a long moment before chai says, “i’m sorry i was mean to you.”

riley shrugs. “it’s okay. i’ve had worse happen.” riley sits up; starts to leave. 

“do you want help?” chai asks. 

riley turns. “weren’t you going to prom?” she asks, smiling a little. 

chai shrugs. “i don’t know. prom seems kind of irrelevant now.”

“sure,” riley says, and chai gets up and takes her hand. 

they get outside to find charlie’s car crashed into a tree. missy stands in the center of their small courtyard. smackle has transformed, and is standing in front of farkle and charlie, and chai gasps breathlessly into riley’s ear. 

“don’t tell me werewolves are real too,” she says, and riley rolls her eyes. 

“they are but can we talk about it later,” riley asks. chai nods. 

riley can hear missy talking to smackle. “oh, what a pretty little pet you are,” she croons. “when i take over this garbage town, you’ll be my pet. how’d you like that, wolfy? how’d you like to be mine?” she lears, and smackle growls deep and low. 

missy laughs again. “it’s so cute you think you can protect them,” she says. 

“she can’t, but i can,” riley says. 

missy turns. “oh, you again,” she says in a tone that implies she is dreadfully bored, and riley runs towards her, using the momentum to try and attack, but missy bats her off and she crashes to the ground, where missy leaps on top of her and riley knows nothing more than that she’s going to die, and. 

and then. missy looks up, says, “isaiah?” and in that moment, riley stakes her and she turns to dust. 

zay stands behind riley’s head and helps her up. riley grins, a little giddy. “thanks,” she says. 

zay shrugs. “no problem,” he says. 

chai grabs riley’s hand, and zay takes her other hand, and she leans on his shoulder, and they walk over to smackle, who is looking decidedly more human, and farkle says, “i think we just saved the world,” and riley grins.

“well, we saved the town,” riley says, and everyone laughs, and riley feels at home for the first time since she’s moved upstate. 

**there. isn’t that a nice place to stop?**

**too bad it isn’t the end.**


End file.
